The incredible growth of the Internet has provided ready access to a wealth of information. The World Wide Web is an ever-expanding repository of information spanning any and all conceivable topics limited only by the imagination of the information content provider. The overwhelming benefits attendant to this ubiquity, however, are counterbalanced to some extent by the inevitable loss of privacy associated with accessing a global computer network.
As the Internet evolves into the dominant commercial medium, merchants seeking to leverage data about Internet user's to better focus their marketing efforts must do so in a manner that respects the privacy interests of their intended customer. Such interests have been the focal point of messages from leaders in government and in the high technology industry. The common theme being that in order to assure the unimpeded commercial growth of the Internet, it is vital that the protection of individual privacy interests is accorded paramount importance. In fact, many leading technology companies refuse do business on-line with firms that do not have a satisfactorily articulated policy on privacy concerns. Industry-backed organizations such as Trust-E help businesses and consumers ensure that they are dealing with companies that have placed the proper importance on on-line privacy rights. Moreover, recent public outcries over intrusive Internet advertising practices are cautionary tales for overzealous Internet marketers.
From the foregoing it can be seen that solutions which provide a means for merchants to make use of customer data while still protecting the privacy interests of individual user's engender considerable interest from the participants in the Internet economy. Owing to the heterogeneous nature of the machines and devices connected to the Internet, simplicity in implementation is a necessary ingredient if any such solution is to be viable. Moreover, the solution should provide the requisite flexibility to allow an Internet user to proactively indicate their desire to selectively provide their private data to selected merchants while their public data (i.e., data which does not reasonably compromise the privacy concerns of the user) is provided to the general audience of merchants on the Internet. Another desirable feature of such a system would be the ability to enable a merchant to target an unidentified consumer via access to such public data, and to provide a “blind” access to private data enabling the merchant to perform target marketing to the unknown consumer based upon public data and the “blind” private data access. Finally, the system should provide access to the private database for performing data mining operations or other types of analysis which do not expose the individual records therein and accordingly raise no privacy concerns. At the present such a system does not exist, and its absence has created a difficult commercial landscape for on-line merchants.